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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

As HIT leaders know well, clinical personnel have a wide range of responses to EMRs, ranging from enthusiastic adoption to outright panic. In most cases, hospitals can’t predict which doctors and nurses will need extra support and which will be power users until they roll out their EMR.

However, a new study suggests that by examining nurse attitudes, the HIT team can get some idea ahead of time which will jump on board with mobile EMRs and which will hang back.

The study, which appeared in BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making, analyzed a questionnaire filled out by 665 nurses to compute a “Technology Readiness Index.” In so doing the researchers broke out a series of personality traits that impact on whether nurses see mobile EMRs as easy to use and useful.

Researchers concluded that four traits in particular — optimistic, innovative, secure and uncomfortable with technology — had a meaningful impact on their acceptance of technology, according to Fierce EMR:

* Optimistic nurses were more likely to see mobile EMRs as useful and easy to use
* Innovative nurses saw EMRs as being easy to use, but not necessarily useful
* Those who were insecure or technology-challenged saw the EMR negatively

According to the study write-up, researchers concluded that continuous educational programs aimed at increasing IT literacy should be provided for nurses. It also recommends that hospitals recruit, either internally or externally, more optimistic nurses as product champions for the mobile EMR.

Of course, figuring out the personality types of nurses en masse isn’t practical in most situation. After all, most hospital IT administrators don’t have the time to do a scientific study prior to their launch, especially if they’re doing a multi-layered mobile launch using new tools and introducing new requirements. But it doesn’t hurt to know, informally at least, which types of nurses are likely to be able to lead the mobile EMR charge.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

Even with a well-connected RHIO in place, and a healthy EMR on site, most hospitals have to content with paper records when ambulances pull up to their door. But in Rochester, they’ve changed things up.

The RHIO itself seems to be a hit — 850,000 people, or half of the Rochester-area population, have agreed to have their records shared with authorized medical providers, the paper notes. It embraces 40 healthcare organizations in the 13-county greater Rochester area, providing links to hospitals, reference labs, radiology practices, eldercare agencies and health plans along with the ambulance teams.

To communicate patient information, the EMS workers create an “electronic pre-hospital care document” which can be uploaded to the patient’s medical record (even if the patient declines to go to the hospital). The ePCD technology is available to EMS crews for no cost.

While there’s scattered use of this approach, mobile EMR connections for EMS workers are unusual, as far as I can tell. But with mobile healthcare apps and EMR front ends growing more sophisticated every day, the time is coming soon when anyone who touches the healthcare process in any way, including EMS personnel, will have a wirelessly-enabled tablet loaded with the software they need to report on the patient.

Frankly, I’m surprised all EMS techs don’t have such a tool already. It just makes too much sense.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

By the way, to be clear, plenty of physicians are already accessing EMRs via mobile devices. The thing is, most access the EMR through some kludgy solution like a Citrix client, which leaves much to be desired in the way of flexibility and usability. So getting a “real” client onto the key devices is a hot item.

The survey, which was conduced by Sage Software successor Vitera Healthcare, reached out to 240 Vitera customers, most of whom were office-based physicians. In the study, which was reported by Information Week, 72 percent of respondents said they used mobile devices in healthcare. However, they mostly used their tablets and smartphones to do medical research or communicate with other staff members — in fact, only six percent were using the devices to connect to EMRs or do e-prescribing.

What stood out most of all in this research was that 91 percent of physician respondents said they’d be interested in a mobile EMR solution. Features they like the best include ability to review and update patient charts and order prescriptions, along with documenting patient encounters. In other words, they want to be able to do virtually everything they can do from a desktop.

Not surprisingly, Vitera is working on its own mobile EMR solution, designed for use on iPads (though usable on iPhones). eClinicalworks is expected to launch an iPad-native EMR shortly.

It’s a lock that over the next few months, other vendors will take the same steps. The question is how usable these iPad and Android clients will be. We’ll soon find out though!